Budget matters in B2B because we need to see conversion and a steady movement towards conversion in increasingly niche clusters of customers. This in part explains to rise to dominance of Google in analytics – and the myriad of companies offering the same or similar in the area of analytics, web traffic tracking and conversion.

Managing a marketing budget and investing in the right activities, tools and technologies is one of the biggest challenges facing the modern B2B marketer. There are lots of ways to dump budget fast – that’s probably why big ticket items like advertising campaigns and trade shows are the first to go when budgets get cut.

You can make it easier for yourself if your business has a clear picture of

Who your audience is

Understanding their points of pain

Understanding how what you offer resolves pain

Understanding where they hang out and how to reach them

Try assessing your marketing spend in a way that fits more agreeably with how the boardroom plan for the business. Instead of a long shopping list of linked activities, try mapping spend across the following parameters. See if you are promoting the best bits of your offer to the right people by comparing where and how you currently invest.

Increasingly, marketers are mapping spend to retention, acquisition using simplified models like this:

60% – Investing in service and expertise that adds value, retains and grows business with existing customers.

30% – Investing in promotion to support new business customer acquisition goals (relative to the growth objectives in this area)

10% – Risk taking: investing in new technologies, a new customer segment or geographical market. This is your safe playground to try different things. This spend is mapped out and ring fenced.

Anyway you look at it, whether you take a simplified or complicated view, money matters in when it comes to B2B marketing. And that puts budget at the heart of your strategy.

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How often does a marketing campaign fail to meet its objectives because of a lack of uptake by the intended audience? And how often is that because of one of these factors:

1. Audiences aren’t clearly defined.

2. Audience needs aren’t clearly defined.

3. We’re trying to sell something to someone who doesn’t want it.

4. The budget and activity is too thinly spread across too many different audiences.

Who makes the decisions about the purchase of your products and services? What matters to them and how do they choose?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, stop throwing money away on marketing and destroying its credibility in your boardroom until you find out.

And if there are too many audience groups to know where to start, begin with the one that is either being poorly served, you can really service better than everyone else or that is the most profitable.